From History's Shadows Come The Chilling, Heartbreaking Story Of . . . The Rape Of Nanking

February 03, 1997|By Ron Grossman, Tribune Staff Writer.

Half a century after World War II, virtually every schoolchild still learns about the Holocaust. Each year on Aug. 6, many Americans pause to remember those who perished when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Yet every Dec. 13, Chinese-Americans are not just pained to recall the 350,000 inhabitants of Nanking who were murdered after Japan's army captured the city in 1937. They carry the additional burden of knowing that most of their fellow citizens hardly suspect the first atrocities of World War II took place in what was then China's capital.

For six weeks after Nanking's fall, Japanese troops carried out mass exterminations of captured soldiers and civilians alike and raped and tortured the city's women--all in vain hopes of coercing the rest of the nation into surrendering.

Survivors of that slaughter can't comprehend how Japanese public officials and even intellectuals could, for 60 years, continue to say such crimes against humanity never took place. Or, that eyewitness accounts are grossly exaggerated.

Imagine if Jewish people had to confront not just the perverse theories of a handful of Holocaust deniers but a German government claiming there were no gas chambers at Treblinka and Auschwitz.

With each year, the ranks grow thinner of those who still bear the scars of that man-made disaster in Nanking. Some can imagine an additional horror: Once they are gone, the world will simply forget what they and their loved ones suffered.

Ignatius Ding, a West Coast computer expert, grew up in China during the war. His earliest memories are of dodging Japanese bombs. Yet the reality of the Nanking massacre hit home only six years ago, when he was recruited to help sponsor a memorial service on the anniversary of the city's fall.

"The story must have been impressed somewhere in my brain," said Ding, 53. "But I never got a wakeup call until then. Men and women in their 80s and 90s came up to the podium--some could hardly walk--and said: `We are old people. But you, you must do something about this.' "

Ding heads an umbrella organization of groups dedicated to publicizing war crimes that took place in China during the Japanese occupation. He has brought his computer expertise to the task, using the Internet to beam his people's message behind the iron curtain of official silence Japan maintains around the issue.

Now Ding has a powerful, old-fashioned tool at his disposal: a book, "The Rape of Nanking," issued by a Chinese-language magazine publisher, Innovative Publishing Group of Chicago.

Its oversized pages carry 400 photographs separated by short blocks of text (both English and Chinese), in the classic style of a coffee-table book. Yet the devil himself couldn't idly leaf through this volume.

On first encounter, it's almost emotionally impossible to acknowledge the content of some of those pictures. Can those really be decapitated human heads lined up like so many bowling balls? One photo shows a great mass of bodies covering a river bank and floating at the water's edge, an image the mind and heart yearn to see instead as the timber rafts of a lumber camp.

Yet in the aggregate, photographs don't lie, for all the sophistry of O.J.'s lawyer. Collectively, these pictures document "an essential part of our history," as Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, writes in the book's foreword.

"We can only forgive what we know," notes Tutu, who saw the violence that racial hatred can inspire during South Africa's time of apartheid.

"The Rape of Nanking" is a work of scholarship produced by decidedly non-scholarly hands. Its principal author, James Yin, was the manager of a McDonald's franchise in San Francisco when he, too, decided he had to take personal responsibility for preserving an accurate account of the destruction of Nanking and its inhabitants.

"I went to the library at Stanford University and the University of California, then out to Yale," said Yin, 69, who has his own memories of China during the war. "On the shelves, there was plenty of documentary material in Chinese. But I could find almost nothing written in English by American professors."

Out in the open

Ying-shih Yu, a Princeton University history professor, notes that our collective amnesia about the Nanking massacre is all the more remarkable because the events were widely reported at the time. U.S. and European newspapers printed accounts of the slaughter under banner headlines. Books were written about the wartime suffering of China.

But after V-J Day, Yu observes, China and Japan reversed themselves in the American mind. With Mao Tse-tung and the Red Army coming to power, China was no longer an ally but a nemesis. Japan underwent the reverse metamorphosis, going from defeated enemy to our first line of defense against communism.

In the process, Japan was able to escape responsibility for having helped start World War II with its invasion of China. Instead, it could portray itself as an innocent victim of the atomic bomb.